From the hypothetical demons that troubled Martín del Rio to Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, the seventeenth century was marked by a steady preoccupation with the unseen. European naturalists wrestled with how to make sense of a universe that seemed to grow more uncertain all the time, even as technologies such as the telescope and microscope continued to reveal how little of that universe they actually saw. Given how central the unseen was to this period, it is unsurprising that the “new philosophies” of nature, those progenitors of modern science, actually embraced occult qualities and powers wholeheartedly, integrating the unseen into their very foundations.1 This dependence on occult causes might be explained by the fact that, after the middle of the seventeenth century, many natural philosophers were “post-skeptics,” the self-conscious beneficiaries of the previous century’s struggles with skepticism and consequently reconciled to a study of nature based on probability rather than on certainty.2 Thus, as thinkers became more comfortable with world systems that did not require demonstrative or empirical certainty, they also became more willing to invoke invisible causes to explain natural effects.
This reduction of visible phenomena to insensible fundamentals like atoms, corpuscles, or other invisible things was mirrored, albeit in reverse, by the efforts of Jesuits like Niccolò Cabeo, Athanasius Kircher, and Gaspar Schott. The philosophical works of these authors exposed invisible causes and phenomena to the gaze of the curious reader, bringing to bear on the problem of the invisible a powerful combination of imagery, artificial emulations of natural processes, and the rigors of Peripatetic logic. The stated intention of these authors was to render insensible causes both visible and comprehensible. Thus, while historians have puzzled over the seeming incongruity of the self-proclaimed enemies of Aristotle embracing a variant of Aristotelian occult qualities in their philosophical systems, a more important question is why ostensible proponents of Aristotelianism were working, at the same time, in the opposite direction: not only seeking to render the invisible manifest but also striving to abolish the very occult causes that the reformers denigrated so loudly and then embraced silently.
I have argued throughout this book that the Jesuits were driven in part by a desire for greater clarity, particularly when it came to the murky ontological space between the natural and the divine. Nature’s secrets, its forces and causes that remained stubbornly resistant to investigation, were what made that boundary so perilous for early modern thinkers. For the Jesuits, dispelling those secrets became a necessity; only then could they point with certainty to the works of God. This insistence on guiding others to an understanding of things beyond the realm of the mundane lends an apostolic character to their efforts to illuminate the structure and boundaries of the world. The vision first fashioned by Ignatius Loyola encouraged simultaneously the illumination of the self and the enlightenment of others, and it expanded exponentially with the growing numbers of Jesuit colleges across Europe and beyond. This drive to educate others was what placed the philosophical elite of the Society squarely at the center of European intellectual life. At the same time, members of the Society were committed to a universal vision of a Church that spanned the known world as well as a single faith that would triumph over the bloody divisions that had fragmented Christendom. Their efforts to bring the imaginative visualizations of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises to potential exercitants across Europe and beyond testified to a deeply rooted desire to share their vision of the universe with others, a desire expressed with eclectic vigor by Cabeo, Kircher, and Schott as much as by their contemporaries.3
Defining an ontology of the unseen, as several Jesuits did with the weapon salve, and abolishing the Aristotelian doctrine of occult qualities were steps taken towards a new kind of philosophy, one that privileged revelation over the occult causes that proliferated in the “new philosophies” of nature. The same was true of the spectacles engineered by Kircher in his Roman museum and later dissected by his disciple Schott. Unafraid as they were to question the utility of the eyes, even to encourage uncertainty, these men presented a probable vision of the universe that they tried to impress into the minds of their audiences. The invisible was familiar territory for the Jesuits, after all, and imagery and the imagination were both central to how they tried to make manifest the unseen.
The Jesuits I have examined here understood, as did their contemporaries beyond the Society, that the familiar cannot be wondrous or marvelous in the same way as the unfamiliar or the unexplained.4 It was in the juxtaposition of artifice and nature that Kircher and Schott in particular cast certain natural processes, those that were invisible, mysterious, or rare, as the workings of artifice—demonstrable, explicable, and presented to observation by illustration and experiment. Thus, nature itself became not only an example of artifice in its own right, as vulnerable to dissection and revelation as examples of human artifice, but an artisan as well, a skilled artificer whose work, at least in theory, the human craftsman could replicate.5
Presenting nature’s most hidden and puzzling processes in terms of artifice reassured an early modern audience that, as in the machines displayed and discussed by Kircher and Schott, the skilled and knowledgeable manipulator could reveal, explain, and control such processes. They portrayed nature as a realm whose secrets had been exposed and illuminated, and the wonders ascribed to nature were now transferred to their own ingenuity. The cultural impact of nature’s wondrous and hidden powers, which had defined European thought for centuries, shifted from the natural world to the artful and artificial worlds embodied in Kircher’s museum, in the texts produced by Schott and Cabeo, and in the later work of contemporaries like Francesco Lana de Terzi. These men transformed the mysteries of the natural world into carefully controlled spectacles, and audiences visiting the Kircherian collection or reading these texts could not have failed to notice that what they actually displayed was not nature itself, but nature as interpreted and presented through the wonders wrought by Jesuit skill.
In the works I have analyzed here one finds the sober admission that, indeed, much of nature is mysterious and difficult to know, that our senses may trick or fail us, that ignorance and uncertainty are more common than we might wish. One also finds, however, the assurance that, however difficult nature might be, we still have the ability to teach it to reveal itself. These men encouraged their fellow Jesuits to abandon the pursuit of certainty and find new, innovative ways to study the world, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of dogmatism and sensual fallibility. Perhaps most importantly, they were willing to rewrite elements of their institutional philosophy to accomplish their goals. In this, they were no different from their contemporaries beyond the Society of Jesus who were also struggling with the crisis of certainty.
I suggested in the opening pages of this book that these particular Jesuits were not outliers, and that we can and should understand their ideas as following from larger preoccupations that already existed within Jesuit intellectual culture. Without the pioneering efforts of Christoph Clavius and Martín del Rio, among others, the subtle and ingenious methods I have examined here might have looked very different. Did Cabeo and the others change Jesuit intellectual life, however? This is a far more difficult question to answer. At first glance, their attempts to render visible and knowable the myriad secrets of nature would seem to have met with stiff resistance from factions within the Society. Cabeo’s novel quality of both motion and alteration was challenged—explicitly or otherwise—by the prohibitions of the Ordinatio pro studiis superioribus, and the light-hearted frivolities of Schott’s Joco-seriorum naturae et artis earned him a reprimand from the Superior General of the Society. Kircher’s struggles with the Society’s censors have been well documented, and his reputation in Rome was as ambivalent as it was elsewhere.
While direct evidence of widespread influence remains to be found, however, there are hints that this concerted attack on nature’s secrets did reverberate some distance within the Society as well as beyond its boundaries. The fact that the Ordinatio pro studiis superioribus required a general prohibition on the idea that there existed more than four primary qualities suggests that, by 1651, significant numbers of Jesuits were already teaching something along those lines. Cabeo’s innovative work on the magnet may have inspired some of those teachings. Moreover, as fraught as Kircher’s reputation was, he was one of the most public and widely read Jesuit thinkers of the seventeenth century; his works were cited by innumerable authors, and his ideas lived on not only in the works of his collaborator and disciple Schott, but also in works like Caspar Knittel’s Via regia ad omnes scientias et artes and Gioseffo Petrucci’s Prodromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani, both of which appeared in the late seventeenth century.6
Whatever the wider influence of the ideas explored in this book, there is no doubt that this persistent preoccupation with the unseen, the myriad affirmations in these texts and in Kircher’s museum that the disparate parts of the world were joined by hidden links and correspondences, worked together to shape a coherent intellectual tradition among the elite philosophers and naturalists within the Society of Jesus. The centerpiece and foundation of this tradition lay in demonstrating humanity’s ties to the unseen parts of our world, and thence to the mysteries of God’s beneficence and power. If it was greater clarity that these men sought, as I have argued, then ultimately it was a clearer vision of God that they struggled to place before the increasingly skeptical and uncertain gaze of their audiences. The secrets of nature, which had tantalized so many for so long, offered a superlative opportunity to peer into the hidden depths of God’s works, and at least some Jesuits used this opportunity to make manifest both the secret intricacies of nature and the designs of their Creator.
Ultimately, Niccolò Cabeo, Athanasius Kircher, and Gaspar Schott found their inspiration as much in the rules and traditions of their shared community as they did beyond the confines of the Society. They were not interested in the coldly objective matters-of-fact and sterile mathematical principles that preoccupied contemporaries—many of them Protestant—elsewhere in Europe. These were men who witnessed miracles every day, and who participated in a faith that was both deeply sensual and warmly exuberant in its eclectic, sumptuous demonstrations of the divine presence. That presence became all the more tangible as the hidden secrets of nature fell away, exposed by imagery and spectacle and Jesuit ingenuity, until all that was left was ad majorem Dei gloriam—for the greater glory of God.
1 Keith Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?,” Isis, vol. 73 (1982), pp. 233–53. For a more recent articulation of this same idea, see John Henry, “The Fragmentation of Renaissance Occultism and the Decline of Magic,” History of Science, vol. 46 (2008), pp. 1–48.
2 Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 330.
3 Antonella Romano, “Understanding Kircher in Context,” in Daniel Stolzenberg, ed., The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (Stanford University Libraries, 2001), p. 410.
4 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 90.
5 On the shift to seeing Nature as artisan, see Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations, vol. 6 (1998), pp. 149–72.
6 Caspar Knittel, Via regia ad omnes scientias et artes; hoc est, Ars universalis Scientiarum omnium Artiumque arcana facilius penetrandi, et de qoucunque porposito themate expeditius differendi. Practice, clare, succincte. (Prague: Universitas Carolo-Ferdinandea, 1682); Gioseffo Petrucci, Prodromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (Amsterdam: Janssonio-Waesbergj., 1677).